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News Abroad

Who Pays When the Last Helicopter Leaves?

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer
Ms. Klinghoffer is senior associate scholar at the Political Science department at Rutgers University, Camden, and the author of Vietnam, Jews and the Middle East. She is also an HNN blogger. Click here for her blog.

Vietnam, Hassan Abbasi has a dream -- a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy skies to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of the"fleeing Americans," forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by"the Army of Muhammad." Presented by his friends as"The Dr. Kissinger of Islam," Mr. Abbasi is"professor of strategy" at the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard Corps University and, according to Tehran sources, the principal foreign policy voice in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new radical administration.

Thus begins Amir Taheri's article entitled" The Last Helicopter." The new strategy adopted by the Middle Eastern powers that be is to wait out the presidency of George W. Bush in the expectation that his successor will follow the examples of his predecessors, i.e., pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan just the way the US did from Vietnam, Iran, Lebanon and Somalia. The real question is who will lose the most when that last helicopter leaves? If the history is our guide, it would not be the US but those countries left behind. Future American presidents may figure out a different way to fight and win the war on terror just as they figured out a different way to fight and win the Cold War. But the same cannot be said about the places left behind. Each one of them paid an enormous price which is further magnified by comparing them to countries which enjoyed the benefits of decades of American presence.

Let us start with South Vietnam. The war-torn country not only did not enjoy years of American economic largess enjoyed by South Korea but it effectively emerged as a colony of North Vietnam. More importantly, millions of Vietnamese became refugees who came to be known as the boat people because they fled the Communist regime in small boats. In addition, approximately 200,000 South Vietnamese accused of supporting the previous regime were placed in "reeducation camps" of various degrees of severity. Their plight eventually attracted the attention of an honest leftists like Joan Baez. Last, though certainly not least, the subsequent Communist take over of Cambodia resulted in a genocide which claimed the lives of over a million people -- 20% of that country's population.

The fate of Iran was not much better. Here, too, there was a mass exodus of the country's best and brightest. Human rights, which were far from satisfactory under the Shah, deteriorated further. Especially hurt were women and religious minorities such as the Baha'i. But nothing disfigured the country more than the cost in life and treasure of the eight year Iran-Iraq war. At least 300,000 Iranians died in that war and another half a million were wounded. The same can be said about the 160,000 to 240,000 Iraqi dead and 375,000 Iraqi wounded. It was a war which could not have occurred had Iran continued to enjoy the American security umbrella.

Lebanon did not fare much better. Indeed, the American withdrawal ushered in an intensification of its already raging civil war and the complete collapse of the Lebanese army. The following year-and-a-half civil war killed approximately 44,000 Lebanese and wounded 180,000. Warlords, terrorists, private militias and the brutal Syrian army ruled the country. Again, the best and the brightest left and the once thriving city of Beirut was reduced to rubble and divided into Muslim and Christian sectors. If Lebanon will finally recover, it will be because the US will help her do so.

The last place the helicopters left was, of course, Somalia. President George H. Bush sent in the marines to alleviate famine. They did. Then, they tried to fix the governance problem that caused the famine in the first place. But when Osama bin Laden and his Somali warlord brought the Blackhawks down, Clinton left. The result has been chaos, growth of piracy and, now once again, famine. Just read the headlines which a Google news search of Somalia brings up.

As stunning as the aforementioned losses are, they are greatly magnified by the flowering of European and Asian regions which did not reject the American security umbrella. Indeed, there is only one way to explain the persistent optimism of the citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq regardless of the enormous hardships and dangers they face daily. They instinctively understand what ideologues such as Hassan Abbasi refuse to acknowledge. The worse thing that can happen to a country is to have the last American helicopter take off. The best thing that can happen to a country is to have Americans consider its well being as its own affair. So, yes, it is possible to make Americans leave. Indeed, it is easy. Both France and the Philippines asked them to leave and they did in a timely and orderly fashion. But the price of evicting them in an untimely and violent fashion is horrendous, not as much to Americans as to the country the last helicopter leaves behind.